Provinces do not nest neatly into geographic regions; in a few cases I
have had to "pick" one.

The preferred romanization is the Pinyin system devised by the Chinese
government. My initial source for this writeup, a 1970Times
Atlas of China, used a mixture of the older Wade-Giles system and
the even older Post Office System. After using the atlas's W-G/Pinyin
table and scanning a few websites I was able to find all of the current
spellings, (as well as changes to the list made since 1970). If the
atlas used a different spelling for an area's name, it follows the Pinyin
spelling in parentheses.

Many, many thanks to shro0m for the idea of labeling provinces with Chinese characters. These were found (for the most part) on http://cn.yahoo.com/regional/countries_and_regions/mainland_china/provinces__regions_and_municipalities/, then converted to entities using tongpoo's wonderful little javascript in Using Unicode on E2. Many thanks again to dharmaraja for proofreading them.

Now, give your accolades to dharmaraja's fabulous writeup, which follows this one. I am in awe.